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OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
“If you look at things from a distance,” I said as I swallowed some lobster, “most anything looks beautiful. – Haruki Murakami
One dreary Monday after school, I had a conversation with another student, during which he stated, with great conviction, that he hated reading fiction. I’d rather read something that actually happened, he argued, to which I quickly responded: but it has. My passionate opposition to his statement arises from my experiences of being both an avid reader and an aspiring writer. Fiction, in my view, is an articulation of the human experience that can enhance our understanding of the world and of each other. The artistic organisation of fiction allows us to comprehend the world in which we live, turning facts and headlines into the living, breathing blood of human experience. Fiction makes sense of the waying, sweeping force of the present, rendering it understandable, all of it: the baffling political jargon; the slithering, slimy rhetoric of diplomatic policy-making and populist appeasement; the complexity, delicacy and sharpness that comes with the navigating of class struggle; the residual, sinister legacies of oppression that our generation has inherited and has to confront. As T. S. Eliot famously said, humankind cannot bear very much reality, but fiction helps us to bear a little more. Reading literature enables you to take on the role of a voyeur, watching from the outside, making judgements on what is happening within. It allows you to confront ideas that are too difficult in reality, whether conceptually or emotionally, and presents them within a safe, fictional setting. I like to think of it this way: imagine life as a photograph on Google Images. You look at it so closely you can see every individual pixel glaring back at you. That’s the reality of the human experience, built up of so many constituent parts, all equally demanding of attention. It’s overstimulating. Perhaps that is only one episode of a life, within a sequence of complicated episodes. Once you zoom out, though, allowing space between you and the event, you can see the overall image in a much more lucid way, through sacrificing the clarity of each pixel. Fiction offers a little distance; imagination is the smoothing over that makes the world digestible. You can inspect and interrogate aspects of your life from another perspective.
People have argued that reading builds empathy; writers channel that empathy in order to encourage their readers to engage with the text, inciting a certain emotion in them. Fiction enables readers to escape their own world for a while, and to enjoy the chaos of another, through characters they care about, plotlines that make them feel something, language that is tantalising. Fiction also imposes order on the world, allowing the politics and complications of life to be processed and organised via the writer’s craft, allowing us, through reading, to develop a new viewpoint. Perhaps we might look at it this way: all communication is a form of fictionalisation. Much of our language is metaphorical, and our everyday speech is littered with idioms and hyperbole. Even when communicating within the colloquial register, we have a tendency to create narratives, in order to incite interest in our listeners. It is an instinctive part of human nature to try to articulate our experiences, and storytelling, whether spoken, or written, permeates our lives. Literature, like all good art, sparks thought and conversation, bringing different ideas together (even if that means having to listen to people who have opposing views on the merits of literature). Ultimately, though, that conversation on a dreary Monday moved onto the next topic – and I had something to write for the Alleynian .
Fiction enables readers to escape their own world for a while, and to enjoy the chaos of another “
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